Teatro Grottesco

Teatro Grottesco is the latest collection of Thomas Ligotti short stories and represents the mature phase of his fiction. In this mature phase, Ligotti's style has shed much of the baroqueness of his earlier style, which made him seem an obvious heir to Poe and Lovecraft. However, Ligotti's sparser style, which often emphasizes the banality of places and people, is probably even more potent in capturing the sense of existence as nightmare, which is one of the main cruxes of the Ligottian tale. If, as appears quite possible, Ligotti does not return to writing fiction, this collection will serve as a brilliant summing up of his thematic and narrative interests.

I originally bought the book, because I like the creepy cover of the book, it mentions in the blurb that the author has a similar creepy, visionary, vividly macabre style to Edgar Allan Poe, so I am intrigued.

Purity: The short story makes it seem like the author is a germaphobe, that they don't like germs, they are in fact afraid of germs & bacteria which is understandable.
He doesn't like the offensive odour of his mother's European cigarettes, and much prefers solitude, his own company, preoccupied with his own interests.
He sounds like a bookworm (a reader to me, with a vivid imagination)
His father has a unknown purpose, for wearing a lab coat, doing some experiments in the basement, where no one allowed unless their father gave them permission to be there, or to help him with one of his experiments/projects.
It's very slow-paced and so far not much is happening in the story, not sure what relevance of the boy visiting the woman's house has to do with his dad, doing some creepy experimentation of people in basement of their house. I get the vibe that the boy's dad is a Nazi doctor of some description, since the short story is called Purity (like the racial purity the Nazi's believed in & were obsessed with)